Districts!

With the release of our preliminaryschedules yesterday, everyone can see we’re officially adding two new Districts to FRC. Everyone is very excited about getting these new Districts up and running!

The New England District will include all teams in the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. If your FRC team is in one of these states, you will automatically be included in this District.

The Pacific Northwest District will include all teams in the states of Oregon and Washington. Just as with the New England District, if your FRC team is in one of these states, you will automatically be included in this District.

Teams outside the designated District areas (Michigan, Mid-Atlantic Robotics, Pacific Northwest, and New England) are not able to ‘opt-in’ to the District model. You are either in a District, or not in a District, based solely on your location. Also, currently, we do not have a mechanism by which teams from outside a given District can participate in individual District events as guests (non-District competitors). Allowing this under the current system would lead to complications and fairness concerns. For these reasons, this will not be permitted in the 2014 season. We are working on a system that will allow teams in different Districts to compete with each other, which we hope to have ready for the 2015 season. This system still may not support District event participation for teams not part of any District, but would allow for some exciting inter-District play. I know this decision to allow only teams within District boundaries to participate in District events in 2014 is going to be disappointing for some of you, and I’m sorry about that, but I believe this is our best path forward at this time.

Can we please come up with a unified name for the new setup? There are district events, but then district championships, state championship and region championship. I know how they all work, but this can get very confusing very quickly. I would propose calling them all regions, and within the regions (ex. MAR, PNW, MI, NE) we would have district competitions. This, in my opinion makes much more sense than having two different meanings for the word "district" and several wordings for what I would call a region.

Hello,
my team has always attended the Boston Regional and I am curious as to whether we must say farewell to Brazil, Turkey, and Mexico? They always brought such fun to the competition.
If that is so I will miss them though do appreciate that it levels the field somewhat for local teams as it keeps teams from out of the district from filling up the high end because, if they can afford to take a trip to Boston it's a good bet they have a good high-end robot.